The main artery of the political refugees' quarter in London runs in a straight line from Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy Square, to the base of Ryder's Court, Leicester Square. But there are places of interest in the lateral streets…many of the occupants have wonderful stories to relate concerning the adventures and dangers from which they have escaped by establishing themselves in London…It must suffice for the present purpose merely to indicate, in very broad lines, what is the principal refugees' quarters in London…the explorer can find out for himself much more than has been stated here.Footnote 1
In his essay on refugees in London, most specifically on the exiles from the Paris Commune, the Communard Adolphe Smith invited his reader to be an ‘explorer’ – to walk the streets of London in order to discover its history. While the twenty-first-century London explorer might struggle to find traces of the political refugees of the Paris Commune of 1871, the explorer of the nineteenth century can give us a much richer picture. By using as a guide the exiles of the Commune themselves, the French police agents sent to follow them, and some contemporary commentators, this article will map the Communards’ London, and investigate how Communards navigated, wrote, and thought about the parts of the city that were important to them. Sharing the capital with its own citizens as well as communities from across the continent and beyond, the Communards made their own unique interventions, and discharged a particular political atmosphere as they navigated London and its people, both friendly and hostile.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was a radical experiment in government. Following the Franco-Prussian war of the previous year, and in defiance of Adolphe Thiers's newly elected provisional republican government (under control of a monarchist assembly), the Central Committee of the Commune governed Paris for seventy-two days in the spring of 1871. As a result of the declaration of the Commune and the attempts made by the provisional government to regain control of the city, Paris became the battle ground for a bloody civil war. In May 1871, la semaine sanglante brought the Commune to a brutal close with the deaths of thousands more Communards.Footnote 2 Following the defeat of the Commune, thousands of Communards fled France to avoid imprisonment or death. As a result, and due in large part to Britain's liberal asylum policy at the time, around 3,500 Communards (including their families) arrived in Britain in the early 1870s.
This article is an exploration of these exiled Communards within the geography of London. It will consider how the urban landscape of London was a vital part of the experience and narrative of exile, and how the city itself was both an enabler and an inhibitor of collaboration, co-operation, and fraternization between exiled Communards in London and their British and foreign peers. The spatial configurations of London's radical and exile communities, and the ways in which Communards interacted with those they crossed paths with, is vital in understanding how some of the ideas that came out of the Commune permeated London's radical scene. Thinking about the movement of ideas this way has implications for the history of ideas more generally. Contextualizing ideas should not just be about ideas in the context of other ideas.Footnote 3 The social, spatial, and emotional context of ideas, and the conditions under which they are exchanged and appropriated, is key to understanding their significance. In short, ideas do not move around on their own, and they are not impervious to their surroundings.
A consideration of the Communard exiles in London speaks to the substantial literature on nineteenth-century communities of political exile.Footnote 4 Many of these interventions have shed light on often marginalized communities, and have helped to complicate national historical narratives by uncovering an abundance of transnational connections. Constance Bantman's work on the transnational anarchist communities of late nineteenth-century Britain has been particularly useful in thinking about informal activist networks and the importance of understanding how and where these networks operated.Footnote 5 What follows has been encouraged by this body of work, and shares in its desire to document the movement of people, ideas, and cultures across borders. Specific to the refugees of the Commune in Britain, Paul Martinez's 1981 D.Phil. thesis was for almost thirty years the only dedicated study.Footnote 6 His is a collective history of the exiles in London from 1871 to 1880. Martinez paints a fairly bleak picture of the realities of exile and concludes that both the French exiles and their British hosts were generally indifferent to each other's political agitations – for Martinez, the Communards’ experience in London was characterized by a ‘mutual incomprehension’ and a ‘pervasive sentiment of isolation’.Footnote 7 My research suggests differently, and in this article I will illuminate how the history of the exiled Communards in Britain intersects with the history of British radicals and socialists in the period 1871–1900. Martinez wrote the history of these exiles because it was unwritten. My motivation is different – I want to show how the Paris Commune influenced British radical thinking in the late nineteenth century by showing how exiled Communards affected the radical mapping of London in this period. The refugees of the Commune operated as points of intersection between French political culture and British political culture, and their time in Britain left a conspicuous mark on the radical mindscape, and landscape, of London.
Illuminating the significance of the Communards in London also highlights some of the more cosmopolitan elements in the vibrant and varied radical club life of 1870s London, and in doing so challenges the still pervasive ‘continuity thesis’ which characterizes the period between the end of Chartism and the socialist revival of the 1880s as a period of largely uncontested popular Liberalism.Footnote 8 While popular Liberalism was certainly persistent, there existed important and influential currents of radical internationalism and cosmopolitan socialisms of which the refugees of the Commune formed a part. Examining interactions between Communards, other international refugees, and domestic radical groups and individuals in the decade before the socialist revival reveals alternative ideas and influences, outside of a popular liberal tradition, that provided stimulus for the reform impulses of the period. Moreover, these interactions highlight how European political ideas and cultures were incorporated into the political imagination of British radicals in the period 1871–1900. Too often British political movements, particularly British socialism, have been presented as being wilfully impervious to developments on the continent. Instead, this article argues that in order to find these sometimes more affective and ancillary foreign influences, it is important to think spatially.
This article will consider the physical presence of exiled Communards in London, and how the places they populated and visited helped to spark these intellectual interconnections between themselves and other radicals. While many encounters were planned, many more were initially simply a product of proximity. Thus, in order to understand the ways in which the exiles of the Commune interacted with their British counterparts, and indeed the influence exerted by the exiles of the Commune in London, it is vital to consider how the exile map of London corresponded with, extended, and even redrew parts of the existing radical mapping of London. In carving out spaces for intellectual exchange, exiles moved within and across various communities and physical places. This article suggests that in order properly to judge the intellectual implications of the presence of Communard exiles in London it is crucial to seek out traces of their political influence in the spaces and places within which they occurred.
The ‘spatial turn’ of the past decades has produced a vast literature in which the key concepts of place and space have been wrestled over, defined, and redefined. Historians, geographers, sociologists, and philosophers have shown that cities and buildings, streets, rooms, and monuments are not static in their meanings or associations. Instead, places are constantly reincarnated as ordinary citizens produce and reproduce social and public spaces, and imbue them with new meanings.Footnote 9 The fluidity of the concepts of space and place can make them hard to pin down, and often even harder to utilize within an historical enquiry in any meaningful way.Footnote 10 Perhaps most relevant here, Christina Parolin's work on venues or spaces of popular politics that existed outside of explicitly political institutions in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, namely the prison, the tavern, and the radical theatre, has been useful in terms of showing how ideas of space and place can survive outside of the abstract, and valuably inform studies of intellectual and cultural life in historic London.Footnote 11 This article will show how other venues – pubs, shops, reading rooms, and club rooms – in a particular part of London became places of importance for an international cohort of radicals with overlapping interests, and facilitated the creation of spaces of collaboration and intellectual exchange. While Parolin thinks about space and place within her own specific historical framework, Katrina Navickas's study of radical reclamation of public spaces by protest movements in northern England in the early nineteenth century utilizes theories of space in a slightly different way – with a focus on the idea of public space, and on the ways in which protest is in part predicated on the subversion of certain spatial codes.Footnote 12 Meanwhile, Rosemary Ashton's excellent study of Victorian Bloomsbury bears testament to the ways in which physical places are relevant and indeed sometimes central to the development of intellectual communities.Footnote 13 These differing ways of invoking spatial concepts speak to the broad range of ideas attached to the terms space and place. As Doreen Massey, herself a key theorist of space/place, particularly with regard to social and gender relations, wrote in her introduction to Space, place and gender, ‘both concepts are incredibly mobile’ and so in using them we must define our use clearly and ‘not pretend to be exhaustive’.Footnote 14
Therefore, to define clearly my own framework: people create figurative spaces within which to conduct relationships and to exchange ideas, thoughts, and intimacies. These spaces of exchange can be mobile; they can operate across various sites or places. But, importantly, these spaces are not invulnerable to the physical places within which they operate. In other words, it matters where people meet and where discussions take place. It matters because people respond to their surroundings: they respond to the subtle atmospheres that make a place variously inviting, hostile, affecting, stirring, or fearsome. Generating spaces of intellectual kinship, comradery, and intimacy, therefore, is shaped by both people and place. This article is about some of these places: physical places in London that were invested with a multitude of meanings by the various individuals and groups who made use of them at the end of the nineteenth century. The exiles of the Commune who came to London were part of a Communard community, a French community, a metropolitan community, as well as political, radical, and international communities, and each of these communities occupied or were affiliated with various places in the city, sometimes simultaneously. Therefore, in order to understand how the exiles of the Commune interacted with and influenced their contemporaries, it is vital to uncover the overlapping and interconnected nature of these places and their people. Doing so is the focus of this article.
The social and spatial context in which British actors absorbed and appropriated ideas from the Commune is key to understanding the importance they attached to the event. Mapping these varied, affective, and sometime chaotic interactions between Communards and British activists tells us something about the way radical and socialist politics worked in late nineteenth-century Britain. The fact that ideas coming out of the Commune spread around Britain often via extra-institutional channels – via informal and often neighbourhood-centred networks – is not incidental to the study of progressive politics in this period, but rather it is instrumental to our understanding of the mechanics of late nineteenth-century socialism in Britain. The fluid and precarious nature of many radical and socialist institutions in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the layered and contradictory meanings that propagators of radical programmes and philosophies attached to the ideas they propagated, means that a history of these ideas must, by necessity, be sensitive to the social, cultural, spatial, and emotional contexts in which they moved. The ‘continuity thesis’ has remained so pervasive precisely because locating some of the radical ideas, groupings, and influences detailed in this article requires a methodological shift. The institutional record can only tell us so much. Only by understanding how radical communities in London overlapped, crossed paths, and created shared spaces of intimacy in different parts of the city, can we begin to appreciate the diversity and vitality of the informal intellectual worlds inhabited by refugees of the Commune and their British sympathizers in London.
What follows has in part been inspired by Stan Shipley's 1971 History Workshop pamphlet Club life and socialism in mid-Victorian London, which Raphael Samuel described in the foreword as ‘neither a narrative of organisations, nor a summary of ideas; instead [Shipley] looks at the political culture in which [ideas] were formed’.Footnote 15 Here I am concerned with the political cultures in which the Paris Communards both found themselves, and helped to create, and it seems that thinking spatially can add a significant dimension to such a study of intellectual cultures in London. Shipley begins by recounting a story remembered by the Austrian Marxist Max Beer (1864–1943) who lived in exile in London for a few years in the 1890s:
In the Spring of 1895 I passed a house at the junction of Tottenham Street and Cleveland Street…in the window of the ground floor living-room a number of Chartist pamphlets and Radical books…were laid out for sale…I entered the room and met there an elderly gentleman…I selected some [pamphlets] by Bronterre O'Brien and Thorold Rogers, paid him the price, and then ventured to ask him his name. He replied:
‘My name is [William] Townshend.’
‘Townshend!…This is a name known to me. I think I saw it among the signatures of the Address on the Civil War in France (1871) issued by the General Council of the International, that is by Karl Marx’.
‘That's it’, he replied. ‘I was a member of the General Council, and sat there with Marx for several years.’Footnote 16
The General Council of the First International on which Townshend sat had met regularly, more than twenty years previously, just down the road from Townshend's makeshift bookshop, at 33 Rathbone Place (north-west of present-day Tottenham Court Road Station).Footnote 17 In the intervening years, the streets and places around there had been the meeting houses, pubs, and clubs of a wealth of radical clubs, both national and international. Foreign radicals like Beer had shared these places with British radicals, socialists, secularists, and freethinkers, as well as revolutionaries from across the continent, who were reading and absorbing ideas on the Commune and the ideas of old Chartists like O'Brien whose followers had met in the same streets in the years before the International existed. Beer's passage seems to capture perfectly the layered radicalism of the area and the varied national and international political aspirations of its inhabitants and visitors. The Communard refugees were a part of this story and as what follows will show, they helped to invest this part of London (now Fitzrovia) with the international radical atmosphere that Max Beer found there.
A historian looking for tangible, material lieux de mémoires might miss the Communards. Unlike previous French communities in London, the Communards did not leave behind a prominent building or church;Footnote 18 and unlike other notable continental revolutionaries, there exists no graves to visit in leafy London cemeteries; there are no blue plaques dedicated to the Communards or their meeting places. Instead, the Communards’ heritage lingered within the character of certain communities and neighbourhoods and became part of the radical atmosphere of pre-First World War London. And by thinking spatially, by mapping the Communards’ London, it is possible to uncover some of these connections and legacies that might otherwise remain obscured.
I
The vast majority of Communard exiles that arrived in Britain stayed in London. A small number settled in Manchester, Nottingham, and Edinburgh, but this was a relatively tiny minority. Paul Martinez estimated the size of the Communard refugee community in London to be around 1,500 adult male refugees, 600 women and 1,200 children.Footnote 19 It was large enough for Karl Marx to declare rather dramatically in July 1871 that ‘London is overrun with refugees.’Footnote 20 However, despite their relatively significant numbers, in much of the literature on exiles in London the Communards often appear as homogenized French refugees as part of a longer narrative of the French in London. For example, in Isabelle Janvrin and Catherine Rawlins’ recent The French in London, the Communards receive only a couple of paragraphs within a much broader chapter titled ‘London, a sanctuary for the politically persecuted’.Footnote 21 Janvrin and Rawlins present the Communards as just another group in a long lineage of political exiles arriving from France, preceded by the deposed sovereigns of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bonapartists, the 1848 revolutionaries, and followed by the anarchists who came after 1880. In a similar vein, Thomas Jones and Robert Tombs’s short chapter in A history of the French in London (2013) treats the mid-century Republican exiles and the Communards together, and so gives the impression of there being a kind of standardized nineteenth-century left-wing French refugee.Footnote 22 Certainly, there were overlaps between the two generations of exiles (some exiles, like Pierre Vésinier, had participated in both struggles and spent two separate exiles in London),Footnote 23 and the various French communities in London were often politically conflated by the nineteenth-century press. However, this homogenized picture obscures some of the significance that can be garnered from a more focused study of exiles of the Commune, and undermines the agency of many Communards who asserted themselves within the geography of London and carved out political spaces of their own.
In the most obvious sense, mapping places that were focal points within the Communard community demonstrates that the exiles of the Commune were distinct from previous French communities; they did not settle solely where their compatriot predecessors had. In fact, Communards expanded the traditional French refugee quarters in Soho (established in the sixteenth century with the arrival of the French Huguenots) and spread northwards, to the northern (Soho Square) end of Soho, and across Oxford Street towards what is now Fitzrovia. The term Fitzrovia first came into usage in the 1940s; before that, the area was often conflated with Soho, or vaguely demarcated as being north of Oxford Street or in the streets around Fitzroy Square.Footnote 24 As Adolphe Smith, our Communard guide, noted, the older, more established French quarter in Soho continued to serve the Communards, being particularly appreciated for its numerous and varied French food establishments – notably the Hotel des Bons Amis on Old Compton Street at which ‘a French dinner, soup, two courses, salad, dessert, half a bottle of wine, and a demi-tasse of black coffee, could be obtained for the modest sum of eighteenpence all included’.Footnote 25 However, the Communards’ more northerly quarters were home to the places the Communards demarcated as being more politically important. Many Communards found that the southern part of Soho, the area around Leicester Square where most démoc-socs of the 1850s had resided, had become home to an influx of prostitutes which had unfavourably changed the character of the area while paradoxically causing rents to rise.Footnote 26 Also, as one police spy noted, the exiles of the previous generation were often hostile to the Communards: ‘all the 1848 refugees who settled in London and who have more or less successful institutions are careful not to associate with those of 1871. Also, the refugees of 1848 are treated as conservative by the Communards and therefore the Communards do not get effective help from them.’Footnote 27 There were some French philanthropic societies that had been set up in London in the 1850s – notably the Société Fraternelle, established in September 1850, which sought to unite the disparate French political refugees of the mid-century through mutual aid.Footnote 28 But while the Société Fraternelle offered some much-needed practical assistance to the arriving Communards in the very early days of their exile, the Société was often unsympathetic to the politics of the Communards, and vice versa, and they went their separate ways.Footnote 29
The lacklustre and even hostile political reception granted to the Communards by existing French communities helped to push the Communards further towards radical communities; areas that presented opportunities for Communards to find politically friendly places, and places out of which Communards could operate their own clubs and associations. Many Communards therefore set up a new ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘sought for lodgings between the Tottenham Court Road and Newman Street, and as far north as Fitzroy Square’.Footnote 30 Jules Vallès, Communard, radical journalist, and editor of the Commune's most famous daily newspaper Le cri du peuple, wrote in his La rue à Londres that due to the infamous reputation of Soho as a den of iniquity ‘we [Communards] instinctively moved away from the cursed neighbourhood: instead it was on the side of Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, that the Commune exiles planted their tent’.Footnote 31 Vallès himself lived for a time at 2 Bedford Street, Bedford Square, between Tottenham Court Road and the British Museum.Footnote 32 While the choice of area in which to settle was largely conditioned by practicalities – limited funds and a desire to avoid the most notorious parts of Soho, while still wishing to remain within proximity of French-speaking areas – moving northwards meant that Communards expanded the boundaries of the existing French communities in London and marked out their own places. In doing so, they helped to further establish Fitzrovia (particularly the areas around Charlotte Street, Windmill Street, and Newman Passage) as politically charged areas which became home to several clubs and international meeting places. A journalist in the Examiner noted that while the area around the Leicester Square was the traditional French quarter, if one travelled ‘north’ they would ‘hear, amidst the rattle of dominoes and dice, the expatriated Communist heaping curses on his compatriots’.Footnote 33 Clearly, there was a noticeable distinction between different French populations, and the Communards were often seen as belligerently political in contrast with their more moderate and assimilated compatriots. For Smith, this was part of the Communards’ legacy: ‘thus, to this day [1909], we have the political foreign quarter in the Fitzroy Square district, north of Oxford Street, and the non-political foreign quarter south of Oxford Street in the Soho District. Of course this demarcation line is not absolute, and the two elements somewhat overlap each other.’Footnote 34
Our guide Smith frequented several of the most notable Communard hotspots of Fitzrovia, including the Communards kitchen – La Marmite – which was established in Newman Passage, the narrow passage between Newman Street and Rathbone Place, in 1871. The kitchen was situated
on the top floor of so wretched a building that there was not space for a staircase, but the room was reached by means of a ladder with a very greasy rope that served in the stead of a balustrade. But here any refugee who could prove that he had fought for the Paris Commune was able to obtain a meal for twopence.Footnote 35
The English Positivists Edward Beesly and Frederic Harrison and their friends were supporters of the kitchen as a political charity and they also established evening classes in Francis Street, on the other side of Tottenham Court Road, where French refugees were offered free English language tuition.Footnote 36 Also nearby was the Communard exile
[Victor] Richard, the prosperous French grocer in Charlotte Street…whose shop has been for many years a head centre, where political refugees, as they arrive from the Continent, go for advice and help in finding lodgings or work, and where, of course, the continental police agents also flock so as to spy upon the land.Footnote 37
Just down the road from Richard's shop, also in Charlotte Street, a Frenchwoman, Elizabeth Audinet, owned a restaurant – ‘a home of scoundrels and rascals’ as one aggrieved police agent put it – which was host to several banquets held in honour of the anniversary of the Commune.Footnote 38
These places, the soup kitchen and the grocer's, were community centres, places with practical purposes that served newly arriving or struggling Communards. They were also political places – meeting spots for planning and discussing and making connections. Richard was a member of the International and was a well-connected and locally celebrated revolutionary – apparently he sold only red beans, not ‘reactionary’ white ones.Footnote 39 The British press later described Richard's shop as a ‘shady haunt’ within which you could find the famous Communard Louise Michel and others ‘discussing the crises of the bourgeoisie and…the vengeance which will one day fall on that obnoxious class’.Footnote 40 Richard's grocery, established in 1871 upon his arrival, served as an informal political hub in Fitzrovia for more than two decades. This little shop on Charlotte Street obliged radicals, revolutionaries, and anarchists from various corners of Europe and is testament to the place-making of many Communards and their attempts to create spaces for political interaction, despite the hardships of exile. The Communards were later joined in some of these streets, Charlotte Street, Rathbone Street, and Newman Street, by German socialist exiles expelled by Bismarck in the late 1870s, and, as Constance Bantman has shown, many Communard meeting places later became the pubs and places that were important to the transnational anarchist communities of the 1890s.Footnote 41 Socialists from Norway and Sweden established their Scandinavian Club on Rathbone Place, and Berners Street (two streets west of Newman Street) became home to the Jewish anarchist club.Footnote 42 In other words, the Communards left a legacy in London: they helped to endow parts of the city with a certain spirit; a particular radical atmosphere.
Often the depiction of parts of London teeming with political refugees from the continent seems to exclude, or have been excluded from, British radical places – the pubs and clubs and meeting halls of British radical groups. However, within the British radical mapping of London, Fitzrovia had long been established as a dissident neighbourhood. The presence of the Communards further amplified this radical character and brought a more pronounced cosmopolitanism to the area, but it did not displace the radical residents – mainly secularists and freethinkers – that preceded it. Chartist groups had made Fitzrovia their home in the 1840s and 1850s, as had the O'Brienites and the early socialists of the 1860s and 1870s. And, as Rosemary Ashton has shown, Fitzrovia attracted many of the pioneers of Christian Socialism in the 1840s and 1850s: Castle Street was home to the Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations – the forerunner of the Working Men's College that opened on Red Lion Square in 1854.Footnote 43 Also nearby, Gower Street (on the Bloomsbury side of the Fitzrovia/Bloomsbury borderlands), was central to the dissenters, nonconformists, secularists, and reformers who were instrumental in founding University College London (UCL) in 1826.Footnote 44 The London club movement mushroomed in the 1870s and numerous groups joined the remnants of old groups, and the newly installed Communards, in the streets in and around Fitzrovia.Footnote 45 Andreas Scheu, the Austrian social democrat who emigrated to London in 1874, remembered joining an informal group of Marxists who met in the upstairs of the Blue Posts Pub on Newman Street (until 1882 when the club moved to 49 Tottenham Street, just off Charlotte Street).Footnote 46 The group included Communards such as Leo Frankel, and several British workers and trade unionists.Footnote 47 Frankel regularly gave talks on the Commune there.Footnote 48 Various Commune celebrations were held around Fitzrovia each year. In 1873, organized by the British Federal Council of the International, the anniversary was celebrated on Great Castle Street, just north of Oxford Street, and in 1874, the Manhood Suffrage League organized a commemoration on Little Pulteney Street.Footnote 49
A particularly good example of this shared place heritage was Cleveland Hall, just south of Fitzroy Square. Cleveland Hall was one of the most important centres of secularism and freethought in London between the early 1860s and the late 1870s.Footnote 50 Various secularists, Chartists, socialists, freethinkers, feminists, and Positivists gave lectures at the Hall in these years.Footnote 51 Frederic Harrison led a lecture series on English industrial towns in 1862–3,Footnote 52 while George Holyoake, the secularist, gave a history of the co-operative movement in Britain.Footnote 53 A decade or so later, socialists and anarchists of the 1880s used Cleveland Hall. Writing in 1887, the socialist William Morris remembered a meeting he had attended at the Hall (probably the Commune anniversary celebration of that year):
Tuesday I took the chair at the meeting…at Cleveland Hall…it is the head-quarters of what I should call the orthodox Anarchists: Victor Dave the leading spirit there. Of course there were many ‘foreigners’ there, and also a good sprinkling of our people [Socialist League] and I suppose of the [Social Democratic] Federation also.Footnote 54
The ‘Cleveland Hall people’, as Morris referred to them, were an anarchist working men's club that met at Cleveland Hall on a regular basis through the 1880s.Footnote 55 For four decades, Cleveland Hall was a centre of political life, both formal and informal, for a motley parade of radicals. The Communard exiles were very much a part of this heritage: the pronounced internationalism of the area around the Hall at the end of the century was initiated by the Communards who had made Fitzrovia their political home in the early 1870s. Moreover, in the 1870s, Cleveland Hall became a place where the concerns of British radicals and those of Communard refugees could converge. In May 1881, the Hall was host to a public meeting held on ‘“The Right of Asylum in England to Political Refugees”, and to protect against the attempts to bring England into the International League against the Foreign Refugees.’Footnote 56 In March 1876, the anniversary celebration of the Commune, organized by the Manhood Suffrage League, was held at Cleveland Hall. Frank Kitz – a British working-class radical, garment dyer, and committed internationalist – described the celebration as ‘a most enthusiastic demonstration’. Attended by ‘a large number of English working men’, he felt that it ‘marked the beginning of the [socialist] revival’.Footnote 57 In June 1874, a banquet was held at Cleveland Hall to celebrate the arrival of the Communards Paschal Grousset, François Jourde, and others who had escaped from the penal camps of New Caledonia, to which they had been banished by the Third Republic following the Commune. There were reportedly more than 120 attendees. Most of these were Communard refugees but many British and other nationalities were also represented – John Hales, trade unionist and secretary of the General Council of the First International, spoke on behalf of the working men of Britain.Footnote 58 These attendees were not all new to one another. Many were neighbours and would have seen each other in shops, pubs, and clubs in the area. For example, Harriet Law, a prominent freethinker and feminist, and the only woman on the General Council of the International, spent a lot of time in Fitzrovia. Eleanor Marx described Law as one of the first women ‘to recognize the importance of a woman's organisation from a proletarian point of view’.Footnote 59 Law was a frequent speaker at Cleveland Hall, particularly in the late 1870s, in part because the secular movement, unlike many of the early socialist clubs, offered Victorian women opportunities to become politically active as organizers, public speakers, activists, and writers. What is more, secularism was the means by which Law believed that women's emancipation could be achieved, and she renounced religion as the chief cause of female oppression.Footnote 60 Law had previously encountered many of her Communard neighbours in various places and contexts. In late 1871, she had given a lecture on ‘the trials of the Communist refugees’ at a meeting of the International.Footnote 61 Law sat on the General Council with the Communards Victor Delahaye, Eduard Valliant, Charles Longuet, and Leo Frankel. She was also a member of the collaborative International Labour Union with Delahaye.Footnote 62 All of these exiled Communards could regularly be found around the various haunts of Fitzrovia, and they were all members of the La Société des Réfugiés de la Commune à Londres which met at the Spread Eagle pub, just a short walk from Cleveland Hall.
Located just down from the intersection of Cleveland and Newman Street, at 6 Charles Street (now Mortimer Street, next to the old Middlesex Hospital), the Spread Eagle was another place that had a long and varied life. This pub was one of the preferred meeting places of the Communards’ La Société des RéfugiésFootnote 63 and the Société Fraternelle.Footnote 64 In the 1850s, it had been one of the pubs used for the meetings of the Soho Chartists.Footnote 65 In 1877, Frank Kitz started an internationalist club for ‘the social democrats of London’ there.Footnote 66 Kitz himself spoke French and German and the club was born of a ‘meeting of English and foreign workers’, for the purpose of ‘social enjoyment, but also as a method for propagating the principles of Social and Political Reform’.Footnote 67 The Club met in an upstairs room of the Spread Eagle in the later 1870s, although it seems that many meetings of the ‘group’ before the club had been properly formed also took place in the same pub in the earlier 1870s.Footnote 68 Charles Murray – a boot closer, former secretary of the Soho Chartists, O'Brienite, and later member of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) – also organized meetings at the Spread Eagle. Murray lived at 49 Union Street (very close to Middlesex Hospital), and Soho and Fitzrovia was the centre of his political life.Footnote 69 After a visit to Kansas in 1872 to view an experiment in land sharing, Murray organized meetings at the Spread Eagle at which he gave lectures on his experience and discussed the persistent importance of land nationalization as a key political strategy.Footnote 70 Thus it was that in the 1870s the Communards, the land nationalizationers, and the revolutionary internationalists were all meeting at the Spread Eagle. The upstairs was the meeting rooms; the downstairs, the bar. One might speculate that many of the drinkers in this bar, either arriving at or leaving a meeting, were known to each other and would have perhaps discussed the ways in which the Land question (in which several Communards, notably Paschal Grousset, later became interested with regard to Ireland)Footnote 71 might relate to the questions of private property under the Commune; or how the politics of the Commune could be understood within a German context, given that revolutionary socialism had since been expatriated from both France and Germany; or perhaps a Communard might have enquired as to where one might find a political pamphlet of one kind or another and have been directed to Townshend's bookshop.
Thinking about Fitzrovia – the streets around Cleveland Hall, the Spread Eagle, Victor Richard's shop, and elsewhere – it is very tempting to imagine an intellectually porous utopia. The reality was probably not quite so enchanted – we cannot know exactly what sort of things were discussed between people over a pint, and much of the interaction between Communards and others has left little trace. However, mapping the radicalisms of Fitzrovia shows a cosmopolitan and politicized area, of which the Communards were very much a part. The radical character of the area and the close proximity of Communard refugees to other radical ideas and organizations reveal the Communards’ Fitzrovia as a place of cross-pollination. While Communards certainly engaged in Communard-only activity, they also shared places, meeting rooms, beer, food, and ideas with their neighbours and contemporaries.
Fitzrovia's politicized cosmopolitan character did not go unnoticed. Descriptions of the refugee areas around Soho and Fitzrovia often mused on this. In the London Echo, a columnist found in the Communard exile quarters – only a ‘bow-shot from the real British Oxford-street, and at less than a hundred paces from the thriving but somewhat unromantic Tottenham-court Road’ – there was ‘a veritable realisation of their [Communards] pet and primary idea – Fraternité’.Footnote 72 Within the Communist clubs of the area, wrote the Echo, ‘the room is crowded with groups of such heterogeneous composition’.Footnote 73 Multiple languages were spoken and various doctrines represented. The anti-Commune forces were also concerned with the geography of the Communard exiles. The hostile press often presented its own explorations of Soho and Fitzrovia in order to stir fears of the proximity of dangerous continental Reds. The satirical magazine Fun caricatured a place
in the most French recesses of Cischanneline Gaul, which is called Soho in the maps of London, a Frencher deep still, a tiny region where the exile can for a while forget that he has exchanged the land of the Marseillaise, the mouchard, and mazagrin [sic] for the soil of freedom, of the bobby, of the porter-biere.Footnote 74
This ‘colony’ was decidedly French: ‘in the bakers’ shops the bread is in the form of long loaves, like giant rolls’ and the neighbourhood is crammed with ‘little cafes and restaurants…thoroughly French institutions’.Footnote 75 And yet it was a specifically London French area – a place where London and Paris collided. Foreign smells and sounds drifted across familiar British streets: ‘the breezes…of a French bystreet are wafted unmistakably to the olfactories…an odour less of sanctity than of absinthe floats about them’. Despite these trappings of Paris, ‘the London fog has penetrated to their marrow, and made them gloomy and depressing, their garcons flabby and feeble-kneed’.Footnote 76 Here were places where the two metropoles blurred, and French and British even began to take on the odours and characteristics of one another. A decade later, Fun remained affronted by the character of the neighbourhood. In 1883, one writer comically suggested that the dangerous schemes propagated by Louise Michel and her Communist friends were an attempt at the ‘Soho-cial Revolution’.Footnote 77
Another very interested party were the numerous police agents sent from Paris to keep track of the Communards. These agents were of course very concerned with the places and circles within which the exiles moved, and they described bars and cafés in which informal and often secretive meetings between Communards and the related activities of various British radicals took place. These reports show that the Communard refugees were not wholly insular. Certainly in Fitzrovia there were places that were more French or more British or more German but there were also plenty of accounts of people and ideas blurring these lines and frequenting multiple places and communities. This was cosmopolitanism in action. For example, one informer wrote to his superior in October 1871 that he had ‘penetrated the places where [he] could collect the most important information: for example, the Deutscher Club, 32 Foley Street, which is one of the meeting places of all the fanatic cosmopolitans’.Footnote 78 There were numerous attempts by Communards, British radicals, and various other internationalists to set up new cosmopolitan clubs or societies. Some ventures did not come to fruition, some did not last long, and others left no record at all and therefore agents’ reports on early meetings are the only remaining trace. Several reports recount meetings witnessed between Communards and British friends, as well as with well-known internationalists including Marx, taking place in various pubs in Fitzrovia. One agent warned of ‘a new international club, headed by a Englishman named Stephens, under the protectorate of Karl Marx, [which] has just been established in Great Castle Street, Oxford Street’.Footnote 79 Another reported that the Communard Pierre Vesinier and the internationalist Bernard Landeck were organizing a new society that would be both political and philanthropic and encourage internationalist sympathies.Footnote 80 These collaborative attempts show that the area was lively with activity that was associated both with Communards and with the bourgeoning internationalism of the area, and that Communard exiles served as impetus for several collaborative ventures.
Many of these efforts replicated the types of community organization that had been important during the Paris Commune itself. As Martin Phillip Johnson has shown, ‘the Commune was both created and shaped by the political culture of popular organizations’.Footnote 81 Johnson argues that the organization of the Commune was ‘rooted in neighbourhoods’ and relied on the politics of association, which meant ‘that clubistes represented a key segment of the population devoted to the Commune’.Footnote 82 So the bulk of committed Communards had been clubbers in Paris – they formed, shaped, and enacted their politics through club life, both formal and informal. From the countless official organizations such as the Club des Prolétaires, the Cercle des Jacobins, and the Association Républicaine which were organized around quartiers, to informal café cultures within which ‘opponents of the Empire socialized and learned to trust or detest one another’, Communard politics were expressed through ‘associationism, which had economic, political, and social facets’.Footnote 83 Radicals in Paris also created fluctuating webs of informal connections via what W. Scott Haine has identified as ‘café friendships’.Footnote 84 These friendships were ‘simultaneously intimate and anonymous’,Footnote 85 as locals frequented neighbourhood cafés and struck up often politicized friendships that could be sustained for many months or longer, without the ‘friends’ ever exchanging names or contact details. In 1871, the Communard exiles carried many of these traditional modes of organizing with them to London and attempted to replicate this political culture. Through political organizations, informal hubs like the shops and kitchens of Fitzrovia, and philanthropic and educational societies, Communard modes of political socialization (both collaborative and Communard-only) could be utilized within the new environment of London, and in doing so gave rise to new diverse communities that combined some of the practices of English Clubbers with the clubistes of the Commune. Crossing paths in pubs and shops in the streets north of Oxford Street, one can imagine a plethora of conversational political exchanges that connected these political cultures. Anthony Taylor has described British informal club life in the pubs of mid-century London as forming ‘the infrastructure of London radicalism…a labyrinth of acknowledged assembly places bound the movement together…this was a kaleidoscopic world of shifting political fragments and organisations’.Footnote 86 Taylor argues that the focus on 1840s and 1880s club life has neglected the vibrant in between period. Certainly, I would argue that politicized socialization in the informal clubs and meeting places of Fitzrovia 1870s and 1880s constituted a ‘kaleidoscopic world’ of political ideas and intellectual exchanges, and one that was increasingly cosmopolitan. When thought about this way, the cross-pollination between British radicals and Communards in parts of London is easy to conjure. This blending of radical practices is what helped to produce the hybridity of the Fitzrovia area at the end of the nineteenth century. As Doreen Massey understood, places
are always constructed out of articulations of social relations…which are not only internal to that locale but which link them to elsewhere. Their ‘local uniqueness’ is always already a product in part of ‘global’ forces, where global in this context refers not necessarily to the planetary scale, but the geographical beyond, the world beyond the place itself.Footnote 87
In other words, the marginality of Fitzrovia as an established place of political dissent and politicized sociability allowed Communards to find and create places there in which they could link their own marginalization to that of the neighbours they found there, thus creating new and radical hybrid places.
II
So far, this article has focused on the streets, clubs, and places of a very small area in order to consider how Communard refugees helped to shape the political atmosphere of Fitzrovia. But of course, there were places of importance beyond this area. To the south-east of Fitzrovia, Communards and their comrades, those referred to by the French police agents who watched them as ‘Holborniens’, found political and intellectual communities in that eponymous area.Footnote 88 Some Communards with greater means moved out to the leafier suburbs of London, for example Édouard Vaillant – member of the Commune Council for the 20th arrondisement – was joined in exile by his wealthy mother and lived very comfortably in Kentish Town.Footnote 89 Most notable, though, was a place just beyond the imprecise borders of Fitzrovia and Soho. The proximity of Bloomsbury (a more intellectually prestigious area) was part of what made the close-but-more-affordable Fitzrovia area so attractive. Nearby, in the heart of Bloomsbury, could be found a place that provided intellectual stimulation without national or strict political affiliation, and that was accessible to a wealth of radical activists. This esteemed place, just a short walk from Fitzrovia, was the reading room of the British Museum.
‘The fact which most strikes us in connection with the Museum Library is its wonderful accessibility…in many cases it serves as a shelter, – a refuge, in more senses than one, for the destitute’:Footnote 90 so wrote nineteenth-century feminist poet Amy Levy. In this refuge, according to the Communard Jules Vallès, ‘they served every reader equally, no matter how he was dressed’.Footnote 91 Vallès, who was notoriously disparaging towards British attitudes, culture, food, weather, and just about everything else in La rue à Londres, identified the reading room of the British Museum as the only redeeming feature of the grey metropolis. In fact, Vallès found in the reading room a place that not only impressed him as an excellent scholarly resource, but also exemplified for him a powerful kind of internationalism and camaraderie:
The chief librarians speak French; remarkable men, of whom some have been the honour of Cambridge or Oxford. It seems as if they are taking the task of making exile less difficult for those who are far from their country, and they place themselves at the disposal of all…the most obscure as well as the most famous, with a perfect grace, helping each…they believe in God and the Queen, but really they are of the International of Labour.Footnote 92
The reading room at the British Museum had not always been open to all – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it would have been impossible to penetrate without a title or some well-placed friends. However, after the opening of Sydney Smirke's domed reading room in 1857, under the librarianship of Anthony Panizzi, the conditions for gaining entry were relaxed somewhat and the reading room attracted, according to Amy Levy, an increasingly ‘motley crowd of readers’.Footnote 93
Countless socialists from Britain, Europe, and beyond used the reading room of the British Museum in the late nineteenth century. The British socialist Ernest Belfort Bax met the Communards Paschal Grousset and Albert Regnard in the reading room, and their interactions formed part of Bax's conversion to socialism. He wrote that
it was the Commune that awakened me…to an interest in the Social problem, and the first Socialists that I met were members or adherents of the Commune. There was Pascal Grousset, a handsome man, who in the later seventies was a regular attendant at the British Museum Reading-room…I used to see a good deal of him, and often talked over the Commune.Footnote 94
In a letter to a friend, Vallès described the reading room as
a town in itself, full of riches with benign administrators…two yards away sits Regnard, with Lissagaray ten yards farther on. Pilotell'sFootnote 95 just passed and PyatFootnote 96 is due any moment. It's a whole world. Everything and everyone's here. We meet between the rows of desks like people in a village street.Footnote 97
And it was quite a village. Eleanor Marx translated the Communard Lissagaray's famous history of the Commune there. George Bernard Shaw, often seen ‘buried in books’Footnote 98 at the British Museum, first read Marx's Capital in the reading room where Marx himself had written it,Footnote 99 and Annie Besant, the SDF and Fabian activist, obtained her readers ticket in 1874.Footnote 100 In the late 1870s, George Gissing wrote his novel Workers in the dawn (1880) under the auspicious dome of the reading room. Penning the Paris Commune-obsessed character John Pether, who envisions a Commune gloriously erupting on the streets of London, would suggest that Gissing perhaps conversed with the real-life Communards that sat around him as he wrote. Gissing's experience of the reading room itself is documented in his most famous novel, New Grub Street (1891), in which the character Jasper explains how ‘people who often work there [the reading room of the British Museum] necessarily get to know each other’.Footnote 101
In her study of late Victorian women writers in the British Museum reading room, Susan Bernstein describes the reading room as blurring the lines between a public and a private space.Footnote 102 Similarly, the reading room can be thought of as generating both formal and informal spaces of interaction: the performance of being seen at an intellectually prestigious place tempered by the ease of friendly encounters there. Having a cup of tea in the refreshment room or going outside for a smoke all presented opportunities for relaxed conversation.Footnote 103 The readers worked diligently in their rows ‘seeking consolation from books in the land of exile’Footnote 104 – both literal and figurative exile – and found comfort in those around them. They were at once both strangers and co-conspirators.
The British Museum, like Cleveland Hall and Victor Richard's grocer shop, is a potent example that illustrates how much political engagement and conversing and debating could take place in places that were outside of overtly political institutions. The reading room also illustrates the type of associational intimacy that existed in the places occupied by Communards and their contemporaries – people struck up conversation with familiar faces, and engaged in friendly and political discussion without necessarily knowing each other's names or having made specific plans to meet. These places illustrate the interconnectedness of many radical activists and exiles in London, and show how parts of the city could be repurposed as radical meeting places and invested with political and social significance.
III
In 1880, the French government granted a general amnesty to all convicted and indicted Communards. Following the amnesty, the number of Communards in London fell sharply. Those who stayed were generally those who had best assimilated into London life, perhaps married or found lucrative or reliable employment. London itself changed significantly through the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, and the French communities transformed with it. For Adolphe Smith, these were sometimes sad changes, and he lamented the embourgeoisement of the old European Soho:
Round the corner of the next street that crosses Greek Street there was another modest restaurant kept by an Austrian. Here, excellent meals could be obtained for eighteenpence…and many an impoverished refugee enjoyed the refinements of continental cookery. In an evil hour, however, for those who are poor but have refined tastes, a journalist was induced to visit the place, and was so delighted that he wrote a lengthy article of praise which was published in The Times. This little restaurant used to do an average of thirty dinners per day, but on the morrow of the publication of the article a hundred and thirty strangers came to explore the place and sample the dinner…The premises had to be enlarged, the poor refugees fled from the place, horrified by the extravagances of the newcomers, the persistency with which they spoke the English tongue and failed to express any revolutionary sentiments. Thus Ketner's restaurant became known as a fashionable West End resort, but it has lost its historical character, its poor, though interesting frequenters, and indeed Ketner himself has disappeared, for he did not long survive this unhoped-for and sudden prosperity.Footnote 105
While the gentrification of the ‘authentic’ is a familiar story in London, Smith's passage also shows how French refugees, Communard exiles, and others were forced to navigate wider London and find new areas and neighbourhoods as time went on. Communards became more spread out in the late 1870s and early 1880s because the ties of the exile community became less fundamental to survival, as individual Communards made more and more of their own connections. Many of the places in which they had discussed and enacted their politics changed and transformed, but the Communards left their layer in the strata of radical London, and the spirit with which they endowed parts of the metropolis often long outlasted the exiles themselves.
The radical atmosphere around Fitzrovia made Communard exiles feel freer to establish their own political enterprises, both formal and informal, and in doing so they contributed a specific flavour, or ‘aroma’ as Fun would have it, to the London radical scene, which then spurred newer radical communities. And, significantly, whether or not all Communard exiles socialized or politicked in Fitzrovia and around, many of their contemporaries, as well as later generations of radicals, associated the refugees of the Commune as being an important part of the radical atmosphere of the area. Therefore, the Communard presence, both real and imagined, had an impact on the radical political character and culture of this part of London.
Cities teem with legacies that are hard to articulate – that peculiar but perceptible quality that lingers in streets and buildings and exposes the subtle sediment layers of a long and varied past.Footnote 106 Only by exposing these layers can we appreciate how and where political sentiments travelled the informal intellectual worlds of radical London, and in doing so better understand how British radicals experimented with ideas emanating from outside of a popular Liberal tradition, and engaged with continental political ideas. This article has argued that understanding the social life of political ideas is instrumental to our understanding of the mechanics of late nineteenth-century socialism in Britain. Informal conversations, heated pub debates, intimate gatherings, and impromptu neighbourhood meetings were as important to the formation and dissemination of socialist ideas in Britain as were the political programmes and ideological tracts of the various organizations and institutions of the period.
As this article has shown, politicized socialization in certain areas of London – spurred on by the influx of new and exciting radical politics brought by the Communards – shaped fresh political alliances and political philosophies, and helped to create links between British, French, and international activists who frequented the same places. These places – pubs, clubs, shops, and streets – became informal political forums, and bear testament to the ways in which the refugees of the Paris Commune put themselves on the map.
